The scene: Legoland-adjacent, so on that Saturday night at Twenty/20 Grill & Wine Bar, parents were softening with martinis. (What tykes unwound with couldn’t be seen through their plastic sippy cups.)

Fairway friends reclined in the Sheraton Carlsbad restaurant’s leather armchairs, swapping golf war stories. (“I had to putt it to the left…”)

Suit-wearing folks palled around in the corner-wedged bar.

No one was on the front patio – too cold. Inside the 5,000-square foot rust-and-gold accented restaurant diners and drinkers made one last, toned-down effort before turning in.

Then Twenty/20’s Mason jar starters have your artisan bread covered. There are toppings, from tapenade and goat cheese, to hummus and PB&J.

If Norway’s butter shortage has taught me anything, it’s that you can’t dismiss bread-spread alternatives. Even if they are $4 to $6 each and served in precious, makeup-jar-like, glass containers. So I went with a Sonoma-sourced, not-at-all-sour goat cheese - which had nice cheesecake properties. The accompanying house-made strawberry jam tipped the whole enterprise further away from tang. Good.

I also got the $10 barbecued tomatoes and lamb souvlaki. Arriving on four skewers, the starter was the kind of finger food a catering staff patiently offers you on a tray. The pumpkin-seed pesto dip – a tart lotion - was the wrong companion for the earthy souvlaki (think lamb kebab in a tart lotion).

And Robert Lee Carr, the executive chef installed here in September, is on trend with his creamy farro. (A big grain - when cooked it’s somewhere between thick-cut oats and risotto.)

Carr puts it with a mild, Pacific-caught halibut; elegant, chlorophyll-heavy haricot verts; and meaty chanterelle mushrooms. The dish is creamy, sweet, nutty, mellow...and crunchy, at least the outside of that downy block of halibut, which was crisply seared.

A dessert tree arrived at the end, with mousse-filled cups held inside something like a candelabra. Called dessert tapas, they are tiny pick-me-ups. I trusted my eyes and went with a coffee mousse as thick as cupcake, with a frothy head of chocolate sauce. Unlike trusting my eyes to pick a good orange at Whole Foods, the gamble paid off.

Twenty/20 Grill and Wine Bar

The service: “You’re so nice, you’re obviously not from California,” one of the staffers told me, adding that 90 percent of Twenty/20 diners are Legoland-bound tourists. Not many San Diegans abroad in Carlsbad stop in, he said.

My waiter went occasionally AWOL. And I wasn’t into his wine pairing. (For the halibut, he recommended a sauvignon blanc that was viscous, sweet like a room temperature apple juice - and I was pretty clear I wanted a dry white.) Later, the manager Chris McNally hustled out a green apple-y pinot gris (Santa Rita, Car) and a dry Italian pinot grigio (Alto Adige, Kurtatsch). Now I’m a firm believer in double-fisting good wines with every dish.

Alcohol list: Cali-centric wines, natch. But as many pinot noirs as cabernets? Wow. The beer list had few local luminaries on tap.

Summary: Chef Carr, who has a name fit for the F.B.I. Most Wanted list (seriously, do a Google search), has sound kitchen judgment (except for the pesto-souvlaki issue). The menu is coastal cuisine, with Mediterranean influences. A journeyman short rib appears alongside Moroccan-spiced chicken, a cheeseburger, duck breast and hearth-baked pizzas for the kiddos. Carr's most recent entry on his resume was executive sous chef at the Hyatt Hotel & Casino Manila, where the Kansas native crafted Chinese, Filipino, Indian and Western dishes.